In Richard Ford's 'Canada', a retired teacher looks back on crime, tragedies in life: New in Paperback

Perhaps more than the work of any other contemporary writer, Richard Ford's prose gives me a sense that I am experiencing storytelling in a distilled form. Ford's sentences are elegant and unadorned, but as Canada, his latest absorbing novel, demonstrates, the simplicity lays bare a story carrying tremendous emotional weight.

Ford leaves the Jersey middle-class enclaves of his Frank Bascombe trilogy for Montana and the Saskatchewan prairie as Del Parsons, a retiring teacher, looks back on the tragedies that reset his and his twin sister's lives during their childhood.

"First," Del narrates, "I'll tell you about the robbery our parents committed. Then about the murders, which happened later."

In delineating the crimes of his characters, Ford reminds us that, often enough, desperate circumstances alter lives so that "no one would've thought that they were destined to end up the way they did." But at its core, "Canada" makes clear that, as one character tells Del, "Crossing a frontier doesn't really change anything" because "you can't leave it all behind." Like Louise Erdrich, Ford understands the way repercussions of our actions can reverberate far beyond us.

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The Age of Miracles

Karen Thompson Walker

Random House, 304 pp., $15

Walker's debut novel presents an apocalyptic scenario in which the Earth's rotation begins to lag, gradually adding length to the planet's night and days. As Julia, the novel's young narrator explains, the extra time bulges "from the smooth edge of each day like a tumor blooming beneath skin."

"The slowing" wreaks havoc over time – the force of gravity increases, magnetic fields shift and birds die off. Cities experience mass panic, but even as people "scurried in every direction like small animals caught suddenly under a light," they eventually realize that, "of course, there was nowhere on earth to go."

All anyone can do, as Julia's father notes, "is ride this thing out," and as "The Age of Miracles" takes readers through the transformations of the slowing, Walker demonstrates that eventually, "panic, like any other flood, must crest." Life goes on and people react and adapt to the challenges of their new environments. As Julia makes clear, the world may be ending, but bullies still exist and first love still comes with its inescapable embarrassments and awkwardness.

While Plain Dealer reviewer Susan Ager cautioned that Walker's debut "may scare the bejesus out of" readers "prone to eco-despair," she also pointed to the possibility that, "in its magical way, it may comfort when you get out of bed every morning."

While "The Age of Miracles" is about the end of the world, Ager observed, "that youthful longings continue to throb on a moribund planet -- and sometimes resolve themselves in tender ways -- is poignant testimony to the vigor of the human spirit."

For Ager, Walker's novel "lingers, like a faded photo of a happy time. It is stunning."

Reviewing the novel for The Washington Post, Ron Charles came away with a bleaker outlook: "That Random House reportedly paid $1 million for this manuscript may be all the evidence we need that we're living in the final days."

Charles saw Walker's novel as one bearing the marks of "one of the more depressing trends in modern publishing," where a book "too dull for the YA market" has "been dressed up as an affecting literary novel for adults."

The novel's main problem, Charles explained, is that its 300 pages are delivered "in the voice of a rather typical girl," though the problem here is one "of execution, not with the limits of an adolescent heroine. Consider, for instance, the wit and tenderness of the young narrator in Karen Russell's alligator apocalypse, 'Swamplandia!,' or the raw poetry from the girl who narrates Jesmyn Ward's 'Salvage the Bones' as Hurricane Katrina moves in to devastate her world."

In contrast to those two novels, Charles, felt that "The Age of Miracles" leaves reader "only with the typical tropes of tween anxiety set awkwardly alongside the death of the planet. Poor Julia must somehow cope with a new training bra and the destruction of the human race. That's enough to make sixth grade a real bummer.

True Stories

Lev Razgon

Translated by John Crowfoot

Overlook, 320 pp., $19.95

Razgon's memoir of Stalinist Russia was first published in 1988 and translated into English in 1997.

As a journalist in Russia, married to the daughter of a high-ranking Soviet official, Razgon was arrested and imprisoned during the Soviet Union's Great Purge in 1938. Over 17 years, he suffered two long incarcerations in the Gulag and, during a period of conditional release, was exiled from Moscow.

Through 12 episodic essays, Razgon describes his experences as well as those of his family, friends and numerous people he meets in prison, on transports, and in exile. While he can't offer a comprehensive view of the way "the steam roller of Stalin's terror crushed an incalculable number of victims," he warns readers that they "should not be astounded to meet executioners in my book as well as their victims," as "the jailers stood side by side with their prisoners." Life in the Gulag "was a surreal existence in which all were either a victim or perpetrator."

Razgon goes on to say, "I still cannot understand, even today, by what miracle I remained alive, and why I did not share the fate of those millions who lie in unmarked graves and now are among the principal fossil remains beneath the earth of my vast native land. I cannot explain why I survived, just as the soldier who returns from the war, safe and sound, cannot explain why the bullet missed him."

When Paul Goldberg reviewed "True Stories" for The New York Times in 1997, he took issue with John Crowfoot's translation, noting that "with its stilted phrases," it "fails to capture the book's color and energy." Also significant is that, "by changing the order of chapters" from the Russian edition, "the editors interrupted the flow of the narrative."

Even with these problems, though, Goldberg found that Razgon's writing makes for a "magnificent book" that presents him as "a student of his times rather than a victim."

As Razgon "prefers to remain in the background, telling about those who didn't return and, when appropriate, revealing something of himself," Goldberg found that "this reserved, dignified stance, enhanced by considerable talent, allows him to fuse history and art, to present the Stalin era as something more immediate than a distant slaughter of long-forgotten people."

Publishers Weekly also admired Razgon's writing. In a starred review, the magazine's critic said this "remarkable book is a testament to the epochal transformation of the former Soviet Union and the obligation to remember its Stalinist past."

"If Razgon's work lacks the sweep of [Alexsandr] Solzhenitsyn's Gulag accounts," the critic explained, "it is full of wisdom and vivid character sketches of victims and perpetrators alike."

The Race for What's Left

Michael T. Klare

Picador, 320 pp., $17

Subtitled "The Global Scramble for the World's Last Resources," Klare's book takes its title from what he describes as the "concerted drive by governments and resource firms to gain control over whatever remains of the world's raw material base."

Oil, copper, cobalt, nickel, titanium – all of these energy and mineral supplies allow industrialized nations to survive and prosper, and all of these come mostly from sources, mines and wells, that Klare says have "passed their prime."

As he notes, "With existing sources of critical materials facing exhaustion, more and more of our essential supplies will have to come from places that are risky for reasons of geography, geology, politics, or some combination of all three."

Through his book, Klare documents the way countries and corporations, "painfully aware that existing reserves of many vital resources are disappearing," are taking action "to ensure that their country or their company will have sufficient supplies to survive."

In Science News, reviewer Nathan Seppa considered the idea that "some might accuse Klare of underselling the ability of humans to manage" the challenges he discusses. Seppa concluded, however, that "Klare offers some grim realities" as "the facts point to inescapable economic and environmental costs."

As Seppa explained, "Reading this book, it's hard not to think about postapocalyptic fiction in which resource scarcity leads to social disorder. Think Margaret Atwood, Cormac McCarthy and most recently Suzanne Collins' 'The Hunger Games.' Yet novelists often skip over the messy parts along the road to dystopia. It's scary to think that Klare, far from crying wolf, might be providing the sordid details in real time."

In "The New Republic," Jake Whitney also discussed the book's "apocalyptic sense of urgency" as it offers a "a sweeping account of the world's energy dilemma, and a plea for the United States, which has fallen to third place in clean energy investment, to lead the globe toward a sustainable future."

Whitney thought that the book would have benefitted from a broader discussion of the policies of the Carter, Reagan and Obama administrations, but he still found that Klare "adds important context to America's recent strides toward energy independence."

Alibis

Andre Aciman

Picador, 208 pp. $16

Readers familiar with Aciman's novels or nonfiction know that he, perhaps more than any other contemporary writer, captures the style of Marcel Proust. Through this collection of 17 "Essays on Elsewhere," Aciman dissects his memories and emotions in acute detail. Most of the pieces here are ostensibly travel essays, but they also end up being explorations of Aciman's personal history or that of the places he visits.

Just as Proust has his episodes with madeleines, Aciman finds starting points for his intellectual and autobiographical explorations in the smell of lavender, the streets of Rome and sentences in classic French novels.

In The Plain Dealer, Eleanor Mallet felt that Aciman's essay on Barcelona was the best piece in the book with its "crisp and edgy" writing.

She described Aciman as "an astute observer and a strong writer," but the praise came with a significant qualification: "He can craft an affecting story when he gets his ego out of the way."

Mallet's main criticism of Aciman centered on the way "each place he visits also brings forth a lot of erudite clutter." She noted, "At times, Aciman's attraction to luminaries can be labored and pretentious," and she observed that "his facile ability to turn a phrase displays both his considerable virtuosity with language and his arrogance."

New York Times reviewer Teju Cole ("Open City") disagreed with Mallet's assessment of "Aciman's beautiful new book of essays."

Cole acknowledged Aciman's discursiveness, but he saw the author's technique as the trait of "a spirited guide, sensitive to history but alive also to food, sunshine, art and aimless wandering.

"The pleasure of reading him resides in the pleasure of his company," Cole explained. "He knows a lot, and often gets carried away, but he also knows how to doubt himself."

For Cole, "Aciman's deep fidelity to the world of the senses, and to the translation of those sensations into prose, makes 'Alibis' a delight."

The Beautiful Indifference

Sarah Hall

Harper Perennial, 208 pp., $14.99

Hall, the author of four novels, offers her first story collection, a set of seven dark, tense tales.

In "She Murdered Mortal He," a woman on vacation with her boyfriend in an unnamed African country makes the decision to wander into the jungle after an argument. Hall writes, "She wanted to think clearly, get her bearings. She wanted not to feel so lost, or to feel so lost that nothing more could be taken."

Whatever solace she gains from the perfumed greenery is soon extinguished by the realization that in the jungle, she is prey: "She was all meat, all scent" to "a thing born from the jungle: acute and mindless in its predation, glistening-jawed."

In the title story, a woman waiting in a hotel room for her lover wonders if the window to her room on the building's second floor is really kept from opening fully as a measure to prevent suicides. "Better to use the bed, the bathtub," she thinks. "A soft pillowy ending or a wet red one."

Writing for The Guardian, a U.K. paper, Justine Jordan said, "Monstrous events happen offstage over the course of these seven stories: beatings, maulings, suicide and abandonment. But their force is felt all the more powerfully through the measured precsion of Hall's prose, which is always grounded in the exact immediacy of everyday detail."

Publishers Weekly observed that Hall is at her best in this "unassuming, tightly woven debut collection" when she captures "the self-reflective morass that people face when making tough decisions."

Throughout these stories, the magazine's critic went on to say, "Hall is in complete control, playing with the reader's expectations at every turn, mirroring the unmoored state her characters all inhabit."

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